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As you know, many colleges have dropped the mandatory SAT, a standardized test that has two parts: verbal comprehension and mathematics. Each part is scored from 200-800, so the lowest possible score is 400 and the highest 1600.

At many colleges, submitting SAT test scores for admissions has been eliminated or made optional—often during the pandemic—under the assumption that giving scores would disadvantage racial minorities, who don’t test as well as do white or Asian applicants. This was a way to achieve diversity—a way to enact “holistic admissions.”  Even though SAT scores were good predictors not only of college achievement, and of later-life success, measures of potential achievement were considered less important than indices of diversity.

The University of California commissioned a study to test this, and, sure enough, SAT scores were found to be better predictors of “success” than were high-school grades. Nevertheless, the whole UC system eliminated standardized test scores and still won’t consider them.

Now the highly-rated Dartmouth College in New Hampshire has done a similar study, found the same correlative predication as did  the UC system, and has reinstated the requirement for SATs, something it made optional during the pandemic.  Not only will that facilitate the admission of students who will do well, but they found that making tests option had actually reduced diversity, because lower-income and disadvantaged students withheld scores that would have helped them get in.

Click screenshot below to access, or, if it’s paywalled, I found the article archived here.

Some excerpts:

Last summer, Sian Beilock — a cognitive scientist who had previously run Barnard College in New York — became the president of Dartmouth. After arriving, she asked a few Dartmouth professors to do an internal study on standardized tests. Like many other colleges during the Covid pandemic, Dartmouth dropped its requirement that applicants submit an SAT or ACT score. [JAC: Four-part ACTs are alternatives to SATs.] With the pandemic over and students again able to take the tests, Dartmouth’s admissions team was thinking about reinstating the requirement. Beilock wanted to know what the evidence showed.

“Our business is looking at data and research and understanding the implications it has,” she told me.

Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades — or student essays and teacher recommendations — of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing, as I explained in a recent Times article.

A second finding was more surprising. During the pandemic, Dartmouth switched to a test-optional policy, in which applicants could choose whether to submit their SAT and ACT scores. And this policy was harming lower-income applicants in a specific way.

Why?

The researchers were able to analyze the test scores even of students who had not submitted them to Dartmouth. (Colleges can see the scores after the admissions process is finished.) Many lower-income students, it turned out, had made a strategic mistake.

They withheld test scores that would have helped them get into Dartmouth. They wrongly believed that their scores were too low, when in truth the admissions office would have judged the scores to be a sign that students had overcome a difficult environment and could thrive at Dartmouth.

As the four professors — Elizabeth Cascio, Bruce Sacerdote, Doug Staiger and Michele Tine — wrote in a memo, referring to the SAT’s 1,600-point scale, “There are hundreds of less-advantaged applicants with scores in the 1,400 range who should be submitting scores to identify themselves to admissions, but do not under test-optional policies.” Some of these applicants were rejected because the admissions office could not be confident about their academic qualifications. The students would have probably been accepted had they submitted their test scores, Lee Coffin, Dartmouth’s dean of admissions, told me.

The article gives the range of test scores between 1300 and about 1550 (remember, 1600 is the highest), and the chances of students getting into Dartmouth that have a given score; this is divided into “advantaged” students and “disadvantaged” students, not really defined but implied as having come from “poor neighborhoods or troubled high schools.”  Those are surely correlated with race, but “disadvantaged” is not equated to “black or brown”.  The data aren’t biased because, after an admission offer is made or not made, colleges are entitled to look at the SATs of all students who took them, as they’re a matter of record in this way.  Below is the graph that the NYT gives:

One thing that strikes me about this is how damn selective Dartmouth is. I did pretty well on my SATs taken in 1965 (a total of 1512: 800 in math and 712 in English), but that would put me in the “advantaged” class having only about an 8% chance of being admitted. However, with scores in the 1400 range, disadvantaged students would have doubled their chances of being admitted.  Apparently disadvantaged students didn’t know that, and so withheld those scores, which are still in the upper 5% of students taking the SAT!

Dartmouth’s results also dispelled two common criticisms of the SATs:

For instance, many critics on the political left argue the tests are racially or economically biased, but Beilock said the evidence didn’t support those claims. “The research suggests this tool is helpful in finding students we might otherwise miss,” she said.

I also asked whether she was worried that conservative critics of affirmative action might use test scores to accuse Dartmouth of violating the recent Supreme Court ruling barring race-conscious admissions. She was not. Dartmouth can legally admit a diverse class while using test scores as one part of its holistic admissions process, she said. I’ve heard similar sentiments from leaders at other colleges that have reinstated the test requirement, including Georgetown and M.I.T.

Note that they’re not using race to increase students’ chances of admission, but “disadvantage,” and that is legal, even if race is associated with “disadvantage”. The evidence is, however, that had scores been mandatory, and the gap above maintained, Dartmouth would have increased its diversity.

In the end, a school has three choices: not use SAT scores or consider them for admission; make their submission optional so that they are considered as one factor for admission; or make them mandatory, and they’re considered for admission. The first choice eliminates a very important predictor of college success; the second, which was what Dartmouth used until now, partly eliminates the predictors but also may reduce diversity itself, since students don’t know what the graphs like the one above look like, ergo how their scores could affect their admissions; and the third is what Dartmouth decided to do.

I think they made the right choice.  I have no beef with separating “disadvantaged” from “advantaged” students, so long as “disadvantaged” means truly disadvantaged (I’m not sure that “first generation students whose parents didn’t go to college” can be seen as a “disadvantaged” class). “Disadvantaged” should not be automatically assigned to racial minorities, though.

Dartmouth is a rigorous and highly regarded institution, so I suspect other schools who eliminated SAT requirements or made them optional may reconsider their decisions.

 

h/t: Greg

Nineteen undergraduates at Brown University are fasting to help Palestine, but, as noted in the tweet below, the school’s President, Christina Paxson, refuses to meet their demands. (The tweet includes an inevitable chant, but it’s a new one). Because the students say their hunger strike is “indefinite,” and because the President won’t pass on their demands to the relevant investing body, this looks to me like a standoff, ergo a “fast unto death.”

The difference between this fast and the famous fasts of Gandhi is that these students will not come close to death (I’ll make anybody a bet), and in that way are different from Gandhi’s hunger strikes, which laid him low (he once fasted for 21 days) and often worked when the British saw that Gandhi was (pardon the pun) dead serious, and they’d better give in lest India riot. However, even Gandhi’s fasts failed more often than they succeeded.

And here we have a President with a spine, who’s simply not going to give in to the student demands, which of course require that she abandon institutional neutrality in favor of a political position.

UPDATE: Brown President Christina Paxson has informed the hunger strikers that she will not meet their demands.

At the end of her email to the students, she “highlighted University mental health and well-being resources.” https://t.co/XewA9Tf0aQ pic.twitter.com/d0B7CilAEU

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) February 3, 2024

An earlier report from the Brown Daily Herald, the student newspaper, gives the reason for the hunger strike, which involves 19 students:

The Students announced the hunger strike during a Friday afternoon “rally for divestment” organized by the Palestine Solidarity Caucus and Jews for Ceasefire Now on the Main Green, at which approximately 350 were in attendance. Rally attendees flooded the campus center shortly after the announcement. Protestors also called on Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) to support a ceasefire in Gaza.

The divestment resolution, the strikers say, should mirror the 2020 report released by the University’s Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Practices that recommended divestment from “companies which profit from human rights abuses in Palestine.” The committee has since been renamed the Advisory Committee on University Resources Management.

. . .The hunger strike — led by “students from several allied affinity and organizing (campus) groups” — is set to be the United States’ largest since Oct. 7, according to the strikers. Upon review of previous hunger strikes related to the Israel-Palestine war, The Herald corroborated this claim.

Students are also calling for the University to promote an “immediate ceasefire in Gaza” and fully divest its endowment “from specified companies enabling and profiting from Israel’s genocide.” But they will only refuse to accept food until the Corporation hears their resolution.

And from the latest Daily Herald, (click to read):

The President’s refusal:

On Sunday, 19 student protestors entered the third day of their hunger strike, despite the refusal of President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 to meet their demand that the Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, “hears and considers a divestment resolution,” during its meetings that begin this week.

The protestors demand that any divestment resolution be consistent with the 2020 report compiled by the Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies, which recommended the University divest its endowment from “companies which profit from human rights abuses in Palestine.”

This advisory committee comprised faculty, staff, alumni, and both undergraduate and graduate students.

Paxson previously refused to adhere to the report, saying that “the recommendation did not adequately address the requirements for rigorous analysis and research as laid out in ACCRIP’s charge, nor was there the requisite level of specificity in regard to divestment.”

In her recent letter to the protestors, Paxson wrote that the first step toward requesting divestment “is not a Corporation resolution, but rather to submit a proposal to the Advisory Committee on University Resource Management” — the successor to ACCRIP.

Paxson also wrote that she will “not commit to bring a resolution to the February 2024 Corporation meeting or any future meeting of the Corporation.”

This the corportation will not hear the students’ demands, ergo they have to keep fasting. But it’s weird, because they could submit a proposal but refuse to do so. It’s confusing, but perhaps the protestors are demanding not just that the proposal be seen but be voted on.

The strikers have not submitted a proposal to ACURM, nor do they plan to do so, according to strike spokesperson Sam Stewart ’24.

The protesting students also wrote that they “will continue (the) hunger strike as long as President Paxson refuses to engage with our demands.”

In response to the students’ continuation of the strike, University Spokesperson Brian Clark reiterated that the 2020 proposal will not be brought forward for a vote, but that student protesters can submit a divestment proposal through ACURM.

One issue is if the students really continue fasting until their lives are in danger, the university, to avoid liability, will disenroll them (see my bolding below), or perhaps arrest them. This has happened before:

In a December sit-in, Paxson refused to revisit her decision not to adhere to a 2020 report compiled by ACCRIP. During this demonstration, 41 students demanded full divestment from “Israeli military occupation” and were subsequently arrested on trespassing charges and referred to ACURM.

In Friday’s letter, Paxson encouraged the protestors to look after their mental and physical well-being throughout the duration of the strike and shared University health resources available to students. She added that “protest is also unacceptable if it creates a substantial threat to personal safety of any member of the community.”

The University previously disenrolled four students participating in a hunger strike protesting the University’s partial divestment policy of South African apartheid in the 1980s. The then-administration cited health and liability concerns for the disenrollment, according to a 1986 article by The Herald.

I suspect nobody died in this one.

Two questions. First, does the University really invest in companies that “profit from human rights abuses in Palestine”?  That itself is a slippery notion; does it mean any Israeli companies? The article says this:

The University is not directly invested in any weapons manufacturing companies, but a substantial portion of its endowment is invested through manager portfolios, The Herald previously reported. The University is contractually obligated not to disclose the companies in these portfolios, but told students that none have a focus in the defense industry.

“We are confident that our external managers have the highest level of ethics and share the values of the Brown community,” Clark wrote in a Sunday email to The Herald, “including the rejection of violence.”

The University of Chicago wouldn’t even go that far, but would simply say that the contents of its portfolio are confidential.  I’m not sure whether the statement above will satisfy the students, but it apparently has not, for it’s not specific enough for the students.

Second, are the students really determined to fast unto death? I doubt it, for they’d be disenrolled (and that would be soon), and that would go on their record. Also, do they really want to die on this hill? Readers can speculate how long they’ll go without food before they give up.

At any rate, it’s good news that the Brown President will not accede to the students’ demands. If she did, there would be no limit to what students could demand in the future.

h/t: Luana

Today we have the second part of a two-part post on Australian trees, the eucalypts, contributed by Reader Dean Graetz. (Part 1 is here.) Dean’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

The Trees that identify Australia

Australia is one of many countries that include plants as part of their identity.  The national floral emblem is the Golden Wattle (Acacia pycnantha), one of more than 1000 Acacia species found on the continent.  The two colours of the plant represent the essence of the continent.  The golden flowers represent its beaches, mineral wealth, grain, and wool harvests.  The green of the (leathery) leaves imitates the continent’s forests and productive landscapes.

Sparsely located in the arid heart of the continent is this visually striking tree.  Commonly known as the Ghost Gum, it was recently renamed with an appropriate Aboriginal Australian species word (Corymbia aparrerinja).  A much more impressive image is here.

Similarly, sparsely located in the drier areas of the continent is this tree.  Evocatively named Bloodwood (Corymbia opaca), there appears no external colouring which supports that name.\

However, if you manage to find a seeping wound, then the reason for its name will be obvious, the colour of the exuding sap (Kino) is a vivid.

When sedentary farmers and graziers were added to Australia’s population, substantial areas of eucalypt woodland, about 13% of the continent, were transformed.  Trees were either clear-felled and burnt for cropping, or just thinned for pastures.  This satellite image shows a large area of mallee, a eucalypt woodland type (dark), cleared in part for growing (wheat) on the bright sandy soil.  The sharp boundary on the LHS is a state border.  Multiple millions of eucalypt trees have been removed here and elsewhere for the reality of it is ‘Either Them or Us’.

Snow Gum woodlands lie on the snow line and are episodically burnt by lightning-induced bushfires, as here.  The many tall stems of each tree have been killed and have bleached white in the high UV environment.  However, the trees are not dead.  Each tree had developed a lignotuber, and from this a ring of new shoots have sprouted and will replace the tree’s burned canopy in about 5 years, or so.  Even so, the sea of bone white, dead stems is eye catching.

An ephemeral dry-country watercourse with three tall River Red Gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis), the most wide spread Eucalypt, from lining the banks of permanent rivers to tapping the subsurface water of this small dry creek.  Never visually elegant or symmetrical, these trees, with their scrabbling roots and scarred stems, suggest one word: Survivor.

As does this extraordinarily large River Red Gum, possibly the largest and oldest known.  Residing in a cleared paddock, it is still healthily growing and supporting a large canopy.  Eucalypts do not annual ring, so its age cannot be measured, just guessed at 300+ years.  The gap in the trunk was likely generated centuries ago by a small fire lit close to it sheltering from the wind.  Repeated often enough to burn through the sapwood and into the heartwood, thereafter the weather and dry rot eventually hollowed the stem but left the sapwood continuing to thrive today.

All Eucalypts produce very hard, dense wood, which when dried after death, is difficult to saw or cut.  A few species are known ‘branch droppers’: large living branches just drop off, for no obvious reason.  Such species are also known as ‘Widow Makers’ for the fatalities of sleepers and sitters under the canopy.  The River Red Gum – see above – is well-known Widow Maker’.  However, branch shedding usually leaves large openings into the stem to be eventually hollowed out and occupied by parrots, such as this Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo (Cacatua galerita).  Because all Australian parrot species are hollow nesters, dead and holed Eucalypts are much sought after trees.

For an Australian away from the built environment, the visual presence of familiar gum trees reinforces your identity: you are home.  There is another personal experience that builds on this.  And that is the smell of burning gum leaves.  In the past, and still today, whenever a small fire was lit ‘to boil the billy’, the fragrance of the fire was associated with friendship, convivial tea-drinking, and conversation.  Dried gum leaves were the perfect one-match fire starter.  The smell of burning gum leaves is pleasant, readily recognised, and soon becomes a deeply held memory.

“The families back home heard and understood this and sent gum leaves with their letters to those at the front.  Nurses wore gum leaves pinned to their capes.  Soldiers sometimes burned the leaves in small piles at the front line so the smell would drift along the trenches and others could be reminded of their country’s distinctive smell.

The smell of Eucalyptus is the smell of home.”

I mentioned this article this morning, but wanted to give a bit more detail because it’s important in two ways. First, it’s a good and objective assessment of gender transitioning in America, giving both the upsides and downsides. Second, it’s in the New York Times, which has, until recently, taken the “affirmative treatment” side of gender transitioning, staying away from the topics of harmful puberty blockers and those who reverse transitioning (“detransitioners”) or those who avoid medical transitioning after thinking about it (“desisters”). Recently, however, the paper has become more objective on transitioning (this started with Emily Bazelon’s 2022 article “The Battle Over Gender Therapy“, for which Bazelon got a lot of pushback from her colleagues). Pamela Paul’s article takes that even farther. It’s well worth reading. For more plaudits, read Eliza Mondegreen’s short UnHerd piece about Paul’s article, “The New York Times Gets Braver With Gender Coverage“. An except from Mondegreen:

This is a deeply moving piece that goes much further in its implications than anything the New York Times has run before. There are, however, also curiosities surrounding Pamela Paul’s piece, like the editorial decision to relegate her reporting to the opinion pages, and to run an apologia of sorts by Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury, in which she suggests, in the mildest possible terms, that more conversation is a good thing for “humanity, nuance and empathy,” and that gender medicine is full of “complexities.”

If you read that apologia, by the editorial page editor, it’s pretty worthless, trying not to denigrate what Paul said but simply urging “more discussion.” Yes, of course, but all of us have said that all along. But more important, we need more research!

To read Paul’s piece, you can click below, or find it archived for free here if you’re not a subscriber.  This is definitely not an op-ed, however it’s labeled. At nearly 5,000 words, it qualifies at least as “news analysis”.

In short, Paul’s thesis is that America is dealing poorly with adolescents who wish to transition (nobody seems to have any issue with those over 25 who want to change gender), forcing them into an “affirmative treatment” program that affirms their “wrong body” feelings without question, gives them hormones to halt puberty, and then goes on to prescribe hormones that change your secondary sex characteristics, as well as surgery. Rarely do children with gender dysphoria get longer-term, objective care that explores their feelings rather than hustling them on to adopt another gender presentation.  Further, Paul makes three claims—all supported by evidence—that gender activists hate (this is my summary):

1. There is indeed evidence for a form of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD), in which children, without prior indication, suddenly claim they’re in the wrong body and want to change gender.  Gender activists have long claimed that ROGD is a fictional syndrome, one wrongly supported by Abigail Shrier in her readable but much-criticized (by gender activists) book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. This book is still causing controversy, but it seems that, in the main, Shrier’s claims were correct. ROGD does seem to be a real syndrome.
2. It appears that ROGD may be promoted by social media and the urging of peers, who, perhaps having transitioned themselves, urge others to do so. Gender activists have long denied that social pressure plays a significant role in the transitioning of children and adolescents. Given social media and what I’ve read from those who have transitioned, I think social pressure is important.
3. The majority (80%) of gender dysphoric children, if they don’t transition, resolve their identities by the time they reach puberty, often coming out as gay—a much less intrusive result. Further, about a third of people who take hormone therapy stop the procedure within four years, though by then permanent physiological damage, including infertility, might have been done.

Paul will undoubtedly be demonized for this, but I give her many encomiums. She’s a brave woman, who, like John McWhorter, isn’t afraid to tackle “antiwoke” topics in the NYT op-ed section. (Paul used to be the Sunday book-review editor.) She is a woman who is doing good, and I sugggest subscribi9ng to her columns if you take the NYT.

I’ll give a few quotes from Paul (indented) under each topic.

Improper treatment of gender dysphoria:

At 17, desperate to begin hormone therapy, Powell broke the news to her parents. They sent her to a gender specialist to make sure she was serious. In the fall of her senior year of high school, she started cross-sex hormones. She had a double mastectomy the summer before college, then went off as a transgender man named Grayson to Sarah Lawrence College, where she was paired with a male roommate on a men’s floor. At 5-foot-3, she felt she came across as a very effeminate gay man.

At no point during her medical or surgical transition, Powell says, did anyone ask her about the reasons behind her gender dysphoria or her depression. At no point was she asked about her sexual orientation. And at no point was she asked about any previous trauma, and so neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child.

“I wish there had been more open conversations,” Powell, now 23 and detransitioned, told me. “But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.”

. . .In May 2017, Emerick began searching “gender” online and encountered trans advocacy websites. After realizing she could “pick the other side,” she told her mother, “I’m sick of being called a dyke and not a real girl.” If she were a man, she’d be free to pursue relationships with women.

That September, she and her mother met with a licensed professional counselor for the first of two 90-minute consultations. She told the counselor that she had wished to be a Boy Scout rather than a Girl Scout. She said she didn’t like being gay or a butch lesbian. She also told the counselor that she had suffered from anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. The clinic recommended testosterone, which was prescribed by a nearby L.G.B.T.Q. health clinic. Shortly thereafter, she was also diagnosed with A.D.H.D. She developed panic attacks. At age 17, she was cleared for a double mastectomy.

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m having my breasts removed. I’m 17. I’m too young for this,’” she recalled. But she went ahead with the operation.

Gender activists and their drive for “affirmative care”:

Progressives often portray the heated debate over childhood transgender care as a clash between those who are trying to help growing numbers of children express what they believe their genders to be and conservative politicians who won’t let kids be themselves.

But right-wing demagogues are not the only ones who have inflamed this debate. Transgender activists have pushed their own ideological extremism, especially by pressing for a treatment orthodoxy that has faced increased scrutiny in recent years. Under that model of care, clinicians are expected to affirm a young person’s assertion of gender identity and even provide medical treatment before, or even without, exploring other possible sources of distress.

Many who think there needs to be a more cautious approach — including well-meaning liberal parents, doctors and people who have undergone gender transition and subsequently regretted their procedures — have been attacked as anti-trans and intimidated into silencing their concerns.

Activists’ resistance to objective care:

Laura Edwards-Leeper, the founding psychologist of the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States, said that when she started her practice in 2007, most of her patients had longstanding and deep-seated gender dysphoria. Transitioning clearly made sense for almost all of them, and any mental health issues they had were generally resolved through gender transition.

“But that is just not the case anymore,” she told me recently. While she doesn’t regret transitioning the earlier cohort of patients and opposes government bans on transgender medical care, she said, “As far as I can tell, there are no professional organizations who are stepping in to regulate what’s going on.”

Rapid onset gender dysphoria:

Most of her patients now, she said, have no history of childhood gender dysphoria. Others refer to this phenomenon, with some controversy, as rapid onset gender dysphoria, in which adolescents, particularly tween and teenage girls, express gender dysphoria despite never having done so when they were younger. Frequently, they have mental health issues unrelated to gender. While professional associations say there is a lack of quality research on rapid onset gender dysphoria, several researchers have documented the phenomenon, and many health care providers have seen evidence of it in their practices.

“The population has changed drastically,” said Edwards-Leeper, a former head of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the organization responsible for setting gender transition guidelines for medical professionals.

For these young people, she told me, “you have to take time to really assess what’s going on and hear the timeline and get the parents’ perspective in order to create an individualized treatment plan. Many providers are completely missing that step.”

. . . . In a recent study in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, about 40 young detransitioners out of 78 surveyed said they had suffered from rapid onset gender dysphoria. Trans activists have fought hard to suppress any discussion of rapid onset gender dysphoria, despite evidence that the condition is real. In its guide for journalists, the activist organization GLAAD warns the media against using the term, as it is not “a formal condition or diagnosis.” Human Rights Campaign, another activist group, calls it “a right-wing theory.” A group of professional organizations put out a statement urging clinicians to eliminate the term from use.

Social pressure:

Many parents of kids who consider themselves trans say their children were introduced to transgender influencers on YouTube or TikTok, a phenomenon intensified for some by the isolation and online cocoon of Covid. Others say their kids learned these ideas in the classroom, as early as elementary school, often in child-friendly ways through curriculums supplied by trans rights organizations, with concepts like the gender unicorn or the Genderbread person.

The suicide trope (the tactic of warning parents that their kids will commit suicide if not allowed to transition, often expressed as “do you want a dead daughter or a live son?”, or vice versa):

After Kathleen’s 15-year-old son, whom she described as an obsessive child, abruptly told his parents he was trans, the doctor who was going to assess whether he had A.D.H.D. referred him instead to someone who specialized in both A.D.H.D. and gender. Kathleen, who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her son’s privacy, assumed that the specialist would do some kind of evaluation or assessment. That was not the case.

The meeting was brief and began on a shocking note. “In front of my son, the therapist said, ‘Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?’” Kathleen recounted.

Parents are routinely warned that to pursue any path outside of agreeing with a child’s self-declared gender identity is to put a gender dysphoric youth at risk for suicide, which feels to many people like emotional blackmail. Proponents of the gender-affirming model have cited studies showing an association between that standard of care and a lower risk of suicide. But those studies were found to have methodological flaws or have been deemed not entirely conclusive. A survey of studies on the psychological effects of cross-sex hormones, published three years ago in The Journal of the Endocrine Society, the professional organization for hormone specialists, found it “could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide.” In a letter to The Wall Street Journal last year, 21 experts from nine countries said that survey was one reason they believed there was “no reliable evidence to suggest that hormonal transition is an effective suicide prevention measure.”

Leave our kids alone: All kids who have serious problems about their sexuality or gender deserve therapy. But they should get good, objective therapy, not “affirmative therapy”.

To the trans activist dictum that children know their gender best, it is important to add something all parents know from experience: Children change their minds all the time. One mother told me that after her teenage son desisted — pulled back from a trans identity before any irreversible medical procedures — he explained, “I was just rebelling. I look at it like a subculture, like being goth.”

“The job of children and adolescents is to experiment and explore where they fit into the world, and a big part of that exploration, especially during adolescence, is around their sense of identity,” Sasha Ayad, a licensed professional counselor based in Phoenix, told me. “Children at that age often present with a great deal of certainty and urgency about who they believe they are at the time and things they would like to do in order to enact that sense of identity.”

Ayad, a co-author of “When Kids Say They’re Trans: A Guide for Thoughtful Parents,” advises parents to be wary of the gender affirmation model. “We’ve always known that adolescents are particularly malleable in relationship to their peers and their social context and that exploration is often an attempt to navigate difficulties of that stage, such as puberty, coming to terms with the responsibilities and complications of young adulthood, romance and solidifying their sexual orientation,” she told me. For providing this kind of exploratory approach in her own practice with gender dysphoric youth, Ayad has had her license challenged twice, both times by adults who were not her patients. Both times, the charges were dismissed

And I find this statistic, which is stable, to be pretty telling:

. . . Studies show that around eight in 10 cases of childhood gender dysphoria resolve themselves by puberty and 30 percent of people on hormone therapy discontinue its use within four years, though the effects, including infertility, are often irreversible.

I could go on with Paul’s stories of “detransitioners” and “desisters,” but you can read the article yourself, especially since it’s archived. But for writing this story, and especially for calling attention to the problems of “affirmative therapy” and for telling stories of those who de-transition, Paul will be called a “transphobe”. She is not, nor are any of us who simply want gender-dysphoric kids to be treated properly.

And good for the NYT  for publishing this. Now we’ll know they’re really serious when they start questioning whether trans women should be competing against natal women in sports, or put in women’s prisons.

This is absolutely unbelievable, but I suppose if you realize that the “Woke Kindergarten” program was implemented in the Bay Area of California, you can sort of believe it. In fact, according to the San Francisco Chronicle (article archived here), this is real, because the Chronicle story links to the woke website below.

“Woke Kindergarten” is just what it sounds like: a “progressive” program (hired by the school) that politically indoctrinates elementary-school students into dismantling nearly everything about America (in this way it comports with Douglas Murray’s thesis in his recent and recommended book, The War on the West.).  The program was implemented because the students, 80% of which are Hispanic, were performing below par in math and English.  But not only did this teacher training program not improve math and English scores, but they also dropped even more.  The school officials, however, claim that it’s a success because attendance rose and suspension rates dropped marginally. But what good is that if student performance dropped?

But read the article below (the headline links to the archived site), and then go to the Woke Kindergarten site and have a look around. Unless you’re Bernie Sanders or Rashida Tlaib, you’ll be absolutely appalled:

First, a summary from the Chronicle.

A Hayward elementary school struggling to boost low test scores and dismal student attendance is paying $250,000 for an organization called Woke Kindergarten to train teachers to confront white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression and remove those barriers to learning.

The Woke Kindergarten sessions train teachers on concepts and curriculum that’s available to use in classrooms with any of Glassbrook Elementary’s 474 students. The sessions are funded through a federal program meant to help the country’s lowest-performing schools boost student achievement.

But two years into the three-year contract with Woke Kindergarten, a for-profit company, student achievement at Glassbrook has fallen, prompting some teachers to question whether the money was well-spent given the needs of the students, who are predominantly low-income. Two-thirds of the students are English learners and more than 80% are Hispanic/Latino.

English and math scores hit new lows last spring, with less than 4% of students proficient in math and just under 12% at grade level in English — a decline of about 4 percentage points in each category.

Efforts to reach the organization were not successful, with an automated response saying the founder, who also provides the training, was recovering from surgery.

District officials defended the program this past week, saying that Woke Kindergarten did what it was hired to do. The district pointed to improvements in attendance and suspension rates, and that the school was no longer on the state watch list, only to learn from the Chronicle that the school was not only still on the list but also had dropped to a lower level.

Click below to go to the site and browse.  I’ll interpolate some of the “woke wonderings” and “teach palestine” (yes, it’s political!) in the Chronicle text, which I’ve indented.

Here are the links (don’t click below); just go to the site and browse:

Woke Wonderings from the program (pictures) with excerpts from the Chronicle interpolated:

Some anti-Israeli propaganda:

Defund the police!

From the paper:

The decision to bring in Woke Kindergarten, rather than a more traditional literacy or math improvement program, aligns with the belief by some parents and educators that the current education system isn’t working for many disadvantaged children.

The solution, these advocates say, is for educators to confront legacies of racism and bias in schools, and to talk about historic white supremacy, so that students feel safe and supported. As such anti-racism programs have spread, several more conservative state legislatures have moved to restrict or ban them.

At the same time, some education experts say struggling schools need research-based literacy and math interventions that ensure all students have the basic skills to succeed. Examples of success include San Francisco’s John Muir Elementary, which has piloted a math intervention program that has led to a more than 50% proficiency rate, up from 15% prior to adopting the coaching and student-led coursework.

That, of course, is the way to go: educationally rather than politically. As for which education programs actually work, well, that’s above my pay grade.

It is surprising that proficiency and math didn’t improve? The students are too busy being politically indoctrinated. From the paper:

Woke Kindergarten, aimed at elementary-age students, is founded on the relatively new concept of abolitionist education, which advocates for abolition, or “a kind of starting over,” said Zeus Leonardo, UC Berkeley education professor. The idea is that certain things can’t be reformed, tweaked or shifted, because they are inherently problematic or oppressive. It’s not about indoctrinating or imposing politics, “but making politics part of the framework of teaching,” Leonardo said.

But some Glassbrook teachers have questioned the decision to bring in the program, saying Woke Kindergarten is wrongly rooted in progressive politics and activism with anti-police, anti-capitalism and anti-Israel messages mixed in with the goal of making schools safe, joyful and supportive for all children.

This tension is reflective of the nation’s ongoing culture wars, where the right and the left battle to influence what happens in classrooms.

The Woke Kindergarten curriculum shared with schools includes “wonderings,” which pose questions for students, including, “If the United States defunded the Israeli military, how could this money be used to rebuild Palestine?”

In addition, the “woke word of the day,” including “strike,” “ceasefire” and “protest,” offers students a “language of the resistance … to introduce children to liberatory vocabulary in a way that they can easily digest, understand and most importantly, use in their critiques of the system.”

Teacher Tiger Craven-Neeley said he supports discussing racism in the classroom, but found the Woke Kindergarten training confusing and rigid. He said he was told a primary objective was to “disrupt whiteness” in the school — and that the sessions were “not a place to express white guilt.” He said he questioned a trainer who used the phrasing “so-called United States,” as well as lessons available on the organization’s web site offering “Lil’ Comrade Convos,” or positing a world without police, money or landlords.

If you look at the program, it appears to be aimed almost entirely at black people, so I’m wondering how it’s used in a school that’s 80% Hispanic.  Do the educators assume that both groups are equivalent in both how they identify with the curriculum and how they learn?

On to Woke Words of the Day:

You know what this next one is about:

From the paper:

Hayward Superintendent Jason Reimann said the decision to hire Woke Kindergarten, which was approved by the school board, was made by the school community, including parents and teachers, as part of a federal improvement plan to boost student achievement by improving attendance.

The school community, including parents, teachers and staff, identified a provider to help them do that, Reimann said. He noted a subsequent improvement in student attendance, with 44% of students considered chronically absent last year, down from 61% the year prior. A similar improvement  was seen districtwide.

Well, they boosted attendance a bit, but “student achievement” dropped. Is that a surprise?  And there are books in the curriculum, like the one below! (Never mind if it teaches the kids to dislike Jews). I’d like to see this one:

A video to introduce children to pronouns. Presumably the teacher explains this. Remember, these children are five years old and up (I gather this is for elementary schools, not just kindergartens.)

From the paper:

The superintendent said Woke Kindergarten wasn’t hired to improve literacy and math scores, but that “helping students feel safe and whole is part and parcel of academic achievement.” He added, “I get that it’s more money than we would have liked to have spent.”

Woke Kindergarten was founded by former teacher Akiea “Ki” Gross, who identifies as they/them and describes themselves as “an abolitionist early educator, cultural organizer and creator currently innovating ways to resist, heal, liberate and create with their pedagogy, Woke Kindergarten.”

Here is Gross, the sole identified person under the “who we are” link:

And the Chronicle‘s money quote:

Julie Marsh, a professor of education policy at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, cautioned that it can be “problematic when teaching strays too far into the political ideology realm. It’s just a big distraction from some of the bigger purposes of education and what we should be focusing on.”

Well, the school and Ms. Gross have obviously decided that what we should be focusing on instead is progressive ideology, including pro-Palestinian politics as well as abolition of the police, landlords, money and the military. Truly, the purpose of this program is to inculcate kids with a mindset to destroy much of America as it is and replace it with. . . . what?  Perhaps the “Capitol Hill Occupied Zone” (CHAZ) of Seattle, an area taken over by the woke in 2020 after the death of George Floyd? It adopted many of the precepts of Woke Kindergarten.  Since cops were prohibited, crime rose and there were several shootings. CHAZ lasted a month.

Woke Kindergarten shouldn’t last more than it’s already lasted. It’s a travesty and an embarrassment for Hayward, California.

All power to the little people!

Answer: Barter, I guess. h/t: Luana

It’s Sunday, and today we continue with John Avise‘s series on African birds. John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photo by clicking on it:

South Africa Birds, Part 6 

This week’s post is Part 6 of a 9-part mini-series on birds I photographed in South Africa during an extended seminar trip in 2007.  It shows another batch of species from that avian-rich part of the world.

Hamerkop (Scopus umbretta):

Hartlaub’s Gull (Chroicocephalus hartlaubii):

Helmeted Guineafowl (Numida meleagris):

White-browed Robin-chat (Cossypha heuglini):

Kurrichane Thrush (Turdus libonyana):

Laughing Dove flying (Spilopelia senegalensis):

Southern Double-collared Sunbird (Cinnyris chalybeus), male:

Levaillant’s Cisticola (Cisticola tinniens):

Lilac-breaster Roller (Coracias caudatus):

Little Egret (Egretta garzetta):

Malachite Sunbird (Nectarinia famosa):

Marabou stork (Leptoptilos crumenifer):

Mosque Swallow flying (Cecropis senegalensis):

Namaqua Dove (Oena capensis):

Good Lord! I had no idea that there were so many songs about money these days. In this eight-minute segment from Bill Maher’s new show, he decries what the desire for goods and dosh has done to the younger generation and their music. He quotes a lot of old rock lyrics about being poor (I remember ’em all!), and compares them to modern ones extolling Gucci, Givency, Rolex, and so on..  Let’s just say that if I wrote this, I’d be called a “get off my lawn” geezer. But Maher is right, and as funny as usual.

Money quote: “Vomiting an inventory of your possessions doesn’t make you a poet.”

h/t: Enrico

Over 100 universities have adopted some version of the University of Chicago’s Principle of Free Expression, also called the “Chicago Statement”: a strong version of free speech, pretty much adhering to the First Amendment. But the same doesn’t hold for another mainstay of our free-speech program: the Kalven Principles. This is the principle of institutional neutrality: that the University is, with very few exceptions, is to make no public statement about politics, ideology, or morality. (The exceptions involve issues which directly affect the mission and workings of the University.)

“Kalven,” as we call it, is an important part of ensuring free expression, for it avoids “chilling” our community’s speech by avoiding official positions that might inhibit opponents from expressing themselves. For example, any statement taking a position on the Mideast War, if it were to come from the President of the University or from a department, might inhibit junior professors or students from arguing contrary positions for fear of losing their job, angering their department, or losing tenure. Thus our statement on the Mideast war is lean and anodyne, merely saying that it might cause people difficulties and giving a list of resources for help.

Kalven holds not just for the administration, like deans, the President, and the Provost, but for all official units of the University, including departments. (Note that, as expected, faculty and students are encouraged to excercise freedom of speech as individuals, or even as unofficial groups, so long as they don’t express an “official” university position.) Likewise, our investments are kept secret from the community so that people can’t demand that we take a political position on how the University endowment is handled.

Although some units can’t seem to avoid trying to make Kalven-violating statements, they are prohibited from doing so officially, and it’s worked pretty well. People speak freely and we don’t get in the Congressional trouble that Penn, Harvard, and MIT did. (Had they adhered to a Kalven statement instead of sometimes making political statements and sometimes avoiding them, their waffling wouldn’t have caused such a fracas.)  In contrast, we got in no trouble because we hardly make any statements about anything. Ergo we’ve lost no donors, for all potential donors know that we’re not going to take positions that will anger them.

Why, then, have only a few universities followed our Kalven principles while over 100 have followed our free expression principles? After all, they are mutually reinforcing: both parts of a unified program to keep expression free and flowing.  The only universities that have adopted Kalven-esque principles, besides us, number two: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Vanderbilt University. (Vanderbilt’s Chancellor, Daniel Diermeier, is a free-speech advocate who was Provost here before he moved south.)  Some professors at Northwestern University have urged adoption of institutional neutrality, but so far little seems to have happened.

Why have universities resisted institutional neutrality? I think it’s because some people, in or out of a university, think that it’s immoral for an institution of higher learning not to weigh in on politics or ideology if they think the “moral” position is clear.  During the Red Scare of the Fifties, the University held to institutional neutrality despite calls for us to denounce communism and fire communist professors (this was before Kalven, but the principle, though uncodified, began with president Robert Maynard Hutchins). It seemed clear to many at the time that Communism was bad, but of course not to everyone, and taking an anti-Communist stand would simply inhibit discussion. Try to think of any political position that can be held by a University without potentially inhibiting speech!

But I digress. I want to note that another university has just joined the three having official institutional neutrality. And that is Columbia University, as I learned from this announcement:

From the Columbia Academic Freedom Council:

The Columbia University Senate today passed a resolution for the University to adhere to a standard of institutional neutrality as envisioned by the Kalven Committee. The specific language is attached and is as follows: The University and its leaders should refrain from taking political positions in their institutional capacity, either as explicit statements or as the basis of policy, except in the rare case when the University has a compelling institutional interest, such as a legal obligation, that requires it to do so. This language heavily mirrors the language on our Statement of Responsibilities. If you read the resolution above, and go to page 40, you’ll see this affirmation of neutrality:

Now this isn’t yet perfect, but it’s very close to Kalven. Columbia still needs to clarify what they mean by “The University and its leaders”.  Do departments count? Presumably. What about other units, like Museums and the like? We enforce Kalven for them, too, but that was clarified only through challenges.

Finally, (d) is unclear. What does it mean to “permit inquiry into whether the University’s corporate activities remain compatible with paramount social values”? What are those values? Does this mean that the University can take political positions on investments (“corporate activities”)? That needs clarification.

Still, this was adopted by Columbia’s University Senate, and it’s a good start.

I’m not sure if this new principle applies to Barnard College, which is affiliated with Columbia University but still somewhat independent. Still, surely Barnard should follow Columbia by adopting institutional neutrality. If it does, it wouldn’t be able to make statements like the following, which is a clear violation of institutional neutrality.  I won’t go into detail why it does violate neutrality, but such a statement would be prohibited at the university of Chicago. This one is from Barnard’s Africana Studies Department. Click to read, and if you see the problem affecting free speech here, put it in the comments:

I haven’t prowled Columbia’s website looking for violations, but this site came into my hands via a reader.

Another thing Columbia needs to do, which caused a bit of an issue here, is how, exactly, violations of institutional neutrality will be reported, adjudicated, and dealt with. Still, all universities should take heed. The benefits of institutional neutrality far outweigh its few problems.

From Politico, we hear and see the stalwart War Cats of Ukraine. Click the headline to read:

Excerpts and text (indented) from the article. There are also videos, but I can’t embed them:

Wars are fought by soldiers using bullets, shells and missiles, but also with ideas and propaganda — which explains why cats have become the latest battlefront in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s social media are full of felines, showing how they help soldiers as emotional support animals, attract donations to the military with their fluffy cuteness, and also fight invaders — in this case mice.

Russia is fighting back by humanizing its invading soldiers — often used in “meat wave” attacks against Ukrainian positions and accused of atrocities against civilians — by showing them with their own cats.

Cats usually arrive at Ukrainian army positions from nearby villages or towns destroyed by war. Abandoned by their owners, the pets seek human protection from the constant shelling, drone strikes and minefields.

“When this scared little creature comes to you, seeking protection, how could you say no? We are strong, so we protect weaker beings, who got into the same awful circumstances as we did, just because Russians showed up on our land,” explained Oleksandr Yabchanka, a Ukrainian army combat medic.

They mention and show several cats. Here are two:

Shaybyk the lover

Oleksandr Liashuk, from the Odesa region in southwest Ukraine, gave a purr-out to Shaybyk — one of four stray kittens living with his unit on the southern front in 2022.

“Shaybyk had the biggest charisma. It was getting cold, so I took him with me one night into my sleeping bag. And that’s when I fell in love with that cat,” said Liashuk, 26. “He’s not just my best friend, he’s my son.”

Since then, Shaybyk has moved to different positions with Liashuk, with the pair becoming a viral sensation for their joint patrol videos.

Liashuk describes his cat as the perfect hunter. “Once we were at the position in the forest and he caught 11 mice in one day. Sometimes [he] brings mice to my sleeping bag,” he boasted.

Despite their bond, Shaybyk remains a free cat, but he has always returned to Liashuk. In June he disappeared for 18 long days until he was found by Ukrainian soldiers at a position several kilometers away, chilling with the local felines. “He just needed some love. I call it a vacation,” Liashuk said.

Shaybyk and Liashuk also collect donations for the Ukrainian army, with Shaybyk receiving a special award in September for helping to raise money to buy seven cars and other supplies.

Herych the high-bred

Unlike frontline strays, Herald, known as Herych, is a cat aristocrat. As soon as Russia invaded, Herych, a Scottish Fold, joined his human, Kyrylo Liukov, a military coordinator for the Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation, which delivers supplies to frontline units.

Herych, who lives with Liukov in Kramatorsk, a city in Donetsk region, traveled to the front more than 20 times.

“Every time he was the star of a show, with so many fighters running to us to pet him and take a picture with him,” Liukov said. “Herych was patient — though a little shocked.”

Unlike other frontline animals, Herych remains calm during Russian shelling. “At most he just turns his head to the sound and that’s all,” Liukov said.

Like Syrsky, Herych uses his online popularity to help Ukraine’s army, fronting a campaign that raised several million hryvnias (a million hryvnia is about €25,000) to purchase cars for the military.

The site also reports that the Russians have “weaponized cats for propaganda,” but we won’t talk about moggies on the wrong side of history.

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From the BBC, a coincidental recovery (click screenshot to read):

An excerpt (indented):

A South Devon couple have been reunited with their missing cat after seeing him on BBC Spotlight.

Mike and Marilyn Chard from Bovisand lost their one-eyed cat Tigger back in October.

He was taken in by Gables Dogs and Cats Home in Plymouth but because he was not micro-chipped, his owners could not be contacted.

The couple spotted Tigger on TV when he was seen being held by the general manager at the rescue centre.

When he failed to return home three months ago, Mr Chard said they thought their pet had “gone off to die”.

The couple adopted the stray 12 years ago when he walked through their cat flap with one eye and a bent tail.

Mr Chard said: “We’d gone out for the day and when we came back he wasn’t here, which is not unusual, but he never goes for more than hour.

“He hadn’t been himself for maybe ten days and was due a vet appointment but there was nothing you could put your finger on.

“Apparently when he was out that day he must have had an epileptic fit and somebody found him the next day semi-conscious and took him to the RSPCA, who gave him to Gables. That’s all we know.”

The cat had been nicknamed ‘Bovi-Mort’ during his stay at the charity, but the couple said they were “100% certain it was him from the photographs”.

Mrs Chard said: “He was called Bovi because of Bovisand and Mort because they were thinking of putting him to sleep.”

Mr Chard said: “We were there when Gables opened because we couldn’t wait. They were over the moon he was going back to his owners.

“He’s purring all the time. It’s taken four or five hours of being back here before he got used to where he was. I think he’s just about back to normal.”

Tigger has now been microchipped so he can be reunited with Mike and Marilyn if he ever goes missing again.

All’s well that ends well!

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This story comes from NBC (Channel 4) in New York, recounting how Buffalo Bills kicker Tyler Bass (who works with a cat-rescue group) was excoriated on social media after he missed a crucial kick. Bass and cat fans rallied, donating over a quarter million dollars to the cat-rescue organization.

Click to read:

The article:

Fans found the purr-fect way to show support for Buffalo Bills kicker Tyler Bass.

The Ten Lives Club, a cat rescue organization that Bass has worked with, received more than $250,000 in donations made in his name following the backlash he received after missing a heartbreaking field goal in Sunday’s playoff game, according to The Buffalo News.

The Bills trailed the Kansas City Chiefs 27-24 with under two minutes remaining in the AFC divisional round matchup when Bass missed a 44-yard field goal that all but ended the game and the season for a Bills team seeking its first Super Bowl championship.

After the game, the 26-year-old kicker reportedly began receiving online threats that led him to delete his social media accounts.

The Ten Lives Club made a post showing support for Bass, who has previously partnered with the Buffalo-based non-profit organization to help rescue cats.

Here’s the Instagram post put up by the rescue group 10livesclub.  DON’T BULLY OUR FRIEND! Note that the organization mentions how their phones are “ringing off the hook” with donations:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Ten Lives Club (@10livesclub)

More:

Donations — with the $22 amount being a nod to Bass’s No. 2 jersey — came in from Bills fans, Chiefs fans and other supporters.

The organization raised donations through its website and its social media accounts, which feature a profile picture of a cat wearing a Bills jersey.

“That money came in very, very quickly and will make a huge difference for our rescue cats here in Western New York,” Kimberly LaRussa of the Ten Lives Club told The Buffalo News.

This is very sweet:  “Leave our friend alone.”  I’m glad that although he missed a kick, the cats are the beneficiaries.

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Lagniappe: A battle royale between a Siamese cat and a sand fox (Vulpes rueppellii). What a sound the fox makes! The cat just hisses, but he seems to have the upper paw. I think the fox just wants to cuddle.

h/t: Gregory, Jez

“My name is Ozymandias, Pig of Pigs
Look on my warts ye mighty, and despair!”

—after Shelley (h/t Ant)

We have warthogs for today’s wildlife. Ozymandias is a large male common warthog (Phacochoerus africanus) who lives in South Africa and with whom I’ve become enamored. I’m contributing to his well being, and will be seeing him (but not petting him!) in August. He lives in the wild but is able to enter a fenced area around local houses since the pigs have dug under the fence.

Isn’t he lovely? His “tusks” are modified teeth, and these pigs are sometimes poached for their “ivory”.  The “warts” are protuberances containing cartilage, and are assumed to protect the pigs from damage during battle. As one site notes, “Males have four warts, two large ones beneath the eyes and two smaller ones just above the mouth; females have two small ones right below their eyes.”

All photos and videos are by Rosemary.

Ozy foraging for corn.  Warthogs are herbivores and forage with their front knees bent:

Here’s a video of Ozzy just finishing off a carrot. Keep watching to the end when he tosses his head, demanding more food. There’s a fence between him and the photographer, which ia a good thing because those head-tosses could slash you pretty good.

The locals have built a shallow pool/bathtub for the warthogs. All of them use it, including the babies, but no hog dares come near when Ozy is luxuriating in the water:

Here’s Ozy resting and showing his hugeness. Wait until the end when he raises his massive head and shakes it.

A magnificent beast, no? He’s been described as a “truck with tusks”:

And two more videos of Ozzie’s friends.  First, a female warthog suckling a baby male.  This is probably her baby, but female warthogs often engage in “allosuckling“—feeding babies other than theirs. This may reflect kin selection if the females are related, or simply cooperation evolved in small groups.

And a baby hog running around like crazy in the presence of its mom and a large male hog (possibly Ozy). Note that their tails are always held vertical when they run. A snort from the male drives mother and baby away. Adults are fast: they can run 48 km/h, or 30 mph.

The article below in the City Journal by anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss details harmful changes in interpreting the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)—an act intended to return human remains and funerary objects to the Native American tribes to which they “belong”. The new interpretation appears to be that any archaeological object that can be claimed by Native Americans, even without convincing DNA or provenance connections, and on the basis of oral tradition alone, can be taken out of museums or hidden away.

I don’t have huge objections to the original act except that human remains should be allowed to be studied by scientists before being returned, and so long as the proper group of Native Americans can be identified. But the NAGPRA has expanded, as Weiss recounts in her report (click to read). The new interpretation is a recipe for the obfuscation of history on the grounds of, well, religion, and involves slippery claims what is “more likely than not”.

Here’s some of Elizabeth’s text:

NAGPRA was enacted to repatriate human remains and certain artifacts to modern tribes with direct ancestral links to past tribes. Descendancy, also referred to as lineal descent and cultural affiliation, was to be determined through a “preponderance of evidence” (a greater than 50 percent chance that the claim is true), using data from geography, kinship studies, biology, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, folklore, and history. Also considered evidence was oral tradition coming from modern tribes. All evidence could be challenged and was given equal weight.

It’s fair to say that NAGPRA has been generous to Native American tribes by allowing oral tradition to be used as evidence of ancestral ties to the past, since oral tradition contains creation myths, supernatural tales, anachronisms, and miraculous events. Coming from other religions, such materials are usually not considered in legal cases. Thus, retired attorney James W. Springer and I, in our 2020 book Repatriation and Erasing the Past, pointed out that NAGPRA may be violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” This clause is meant to prevent the federal government from favoring any specific faith; it is charged to treat all religious evidence equally.

Yet, even with the act’s long-standing generosity toward oral tradition, tribal repatriation activists and their allies were unsatisfied with NAGPRA and its terms allowing for the continued research, curation, and display of mostly unaffiliated human remains and artifacts. Nearly all affiliated human remains and related artifacts—by 2020, 91.5 percent of them—have already been repatriated. Critics have focused on the number of materials not yet repatriated, but these consist mainly of unaffiliated materials.

Dissatisfaction among repatriation activists had spurred occasional regulatory changes to NAGPRA. The latest, which went into effect this year, include the deletion of the term “culturally unidentified,” which means that all human remains and artifacts are now vulnerable to repatriation—even discoveries such as the 11,500-year-old Alaskan child named Sunrise Girl, whose DNA couldn’t be matched with DNA from any of the 167 ethnic groups the researchers tested. Sunrise Girl likely represents an individual from a long-gone Beringian tribe.

It would be a crime if “Sunrise Girl”, who represents inhabitants of North America not long after they arrived, were removed from study: click on the link to see what scientists concluded from the DNA of two ancient infants. Further “traditional knowledge,” which is supposed to be weighed in making these decisions, is now malleable!:

The summary of NAGPRA’s latest regulatory revision also states that “museums and Federal agencies must defer to the Native American traditional knowledge of lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations.” Previously, “oral tradition” was given the same weight as scientific and historical evidence; now, it trumps scientific and historical evidence. “Traditional knowledge” was not even mentioned in previous versions of NAGPRA. Native American traditional knowledge is a new term meant to encompass more than just oral tradition. According to the new regulations, Native American traditional knowledge, which is considered “expert opinion,” is defined as “covering a wide variety of information, including, but not limited to, cultural, ecological, linguistic, religious, scientific, societal, spiritual, and technical knowledge.” Further, “Native American traditional knowledge . . . is not required to be developed, sustained, and passed through time”—in other words, it can change at any time. And yet, because traditional knowledge is often “safeguarded or confidential,” its thus cannot be compared with previous decisions based such knowledge—in fact, it cannot be questioned at all.

This is of course all based on the premise that the wishes of Native Americans must be respected simply because they are indigenous people. But surely objects not connected with burial and whose provenance is unknown and can’t be proven, should simply be handed over to scientists for study and then and put in museums. After all, we are not talking about the Elgin Marbles! Unless those items were somehow stolen from Native Americans, what case can be made that they now can be repossessed by them? If you find an arrowhead or a pottery shard, what is the ethical principle that dictates that “traditional knowledge” should have any weight about what happens to the object?

But, as Dr. Weiss notes, this is going to empty out museum exhibits, and for really bizarre reasons:

We can expect bare display cases because some objects will be deemed too “spiritually powerful” to display. AMNH curators have already made similar decisions recently in the renovation of the Northwest Coast Hall. For instance, curators decided not to display a bird bone whistle because Nuxalk elders warned that the whistle could be used as a “summoning tool for supernatural beings.” And Haida tribal members instructed museum staff not to put a headdress on view or even handle the headdress because of the “danger” that they’d encounter—after all, one must “be wary of any object that incorporates human hair.” In other instances, absurd narratives, such as those found in the Northwest Coast Hall, will be taught to children as facts. Children will be told that objects have spirits, that Native Americans came from supernatural animals, and that shamans’ masks contain powers that one should fear.

Are we to cater to superstitions in this way? Are our children now to be subject to the pollution of the “other ways of knowing” trope?

But perhaps the most ludicrous part is this: Weiss’s speculation that contemporary art by Native Americans could be controlled by tribes rather than the artist, a possibility that could be counterproductive to the production of art by Native Americans:

Perhaps most ominously, NAGPRA may eventually extend its reach to art museums. Once all the natural history museum exhibits have been remodeled and the tribes have taken back most of the interesting objects, Native American repatriation activists will likely not be satisfied. New targets are sure to include art purchased from contemporary Native American artists. In a recent NAGPRA information session about the new regulations, art museum curators were told to consult with tribes over the display of art created by contemporary Native American artists that had been recently purchased for display. This may lead to art museum curators deciding to avoid NAGPRA hassles by ceasing to buy or display the works of Native American artists. This will harm the artists most; the museums will find other works.

The basis for these changes are obvious: a desire to cater to those perceived as underdogs, regardless of the strength of their claims. But this catering isn’t harmless, for it obfuscates our understanding of the history of North America.

Update: To see some of the results, click on this article, which a reader just sent me. I’ve used an archived link, so it’s free. I don’t have time to summarize it, but note that the claim that things like darts and canoes are “sacred items” doesn’t carry much water.

Here’s a headline at CNN Health that is seemingly confused about what a “woman” is.  Note that the word, which means “adult human female” appears blatantly in the headlines, but perhaps the headline writer was ideologically different from the authors:

(click on screenshot to read)

 

This is the gist of the article, and, indeed, the word “women” appears seven times in the article. But look at the part in bold (my emphasis):

Polycystic ovary syndrome, known as PCOS, has long been known for symptoms such as missed periods or excess body hair. Now, new research has revealed another potential effect: cognitive dysfunction later in life.

The scientific report “is one of the few studies to investigate cognitive functioning and brain outcomes in those women at midlife,” said Dr. Pauline Maki, a professor and director of the Women’s Mental Health Research Program at the University of Illinois Chicago, via email. Maki wasn’t involved in the study, published Wednesday in the journal Neurology.

Polycystic ovary syndrome refers to symptoms related to a hormonal imbalance in people assigned female at birth. Telltale signs can include “menstrual cycle changes, skin changes such as increased facial and body hair and acne, abnormal growths in the ovaries, and infertility,” according to the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

The chronic condition affects around 8% to 13% of women and girls of reproductive age worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, but as many as 70% could be experiencing PCOS while undiagnosed.

So they use “women and girls” throughout, but slip in the “people assigned female at birth,” as if sex is assigned rather than observed.  As Luana Maroja and I wrote:

Even in apparently objective discussions of sex and gender, individuals are often said to have been assigned their sex at birth (e.g., “AFAB”: assigned female at birth), as if this were an arbitrary decision by doctors—a “social construct”—rather than an observation of biological reality.

Yes, secondary sexual characteristics like genitals are usually used as a way to determine biological sex—a proxy for gamete type—but the annoying implication that sex is “assigned” is unnecessary.  Why can’t they just stick with “girls” and “women”? What would have been wrong with using, in the sentence, “related to a hormonal imbalance in females”?

h/t: Reese

A group of University of Chicago alumni is in the process of forming a “Free speech alliance”, and you can sign up for emails even if you’re not an alum. There will eventually be a formal group of alumni that will discuss free-speech matters at the U of C and, importantly, interact with the University itself on matters of policy.  You can sign up by clicking on the website below, and as a group coalesces, you’ll be informed.

The Free Press has a new 20-minute film called “American miseducation”, centered on pro-Palestinian protests on American campuses.  Given the pro-Israeli stand of that site, the tenor of this film is not surprising: its thesis is that aggressive pro-Palestinian demonstrators are not just anti-Zionist, but largely antisemitic, and on some campuses are intimidating and even attacking Jewish students, who have no “safe space” of their own. (The attack on the Cooper Union library, shown in this film, is an example.)

The film is made by Olivia Reingold, a Free Press staff writer whose bona fides are these:

Olivia Reingold co-created and executive produced Matthew Yglesias’s podcast, “Bad Takes.” She got her start in public radio, regularly appearing on NPR for her reporting on indigenous communities in Montana. She previously produced podcasts at POLITICO, where she shaped conversations with world leaders like Jens Stoltenberg.

And this is her intro to the film:

That was one of 14 pro-Palestinian rallies I’ve attended since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. Like the Rockefeller Christmas tree, the activists behind these events consider innocuous institutions to be their enemies: Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Cancer Center, the American Museum of Natural History, and the U.S. Holocaust Museum.

They insist that their aim is to liberate Palestinians, and that they are not antisemitic. But attend enough of these demonstrations and you’ll start to see the swastikas. Some people have looked me in the eyes and said that Israelis are the new Nazis, the prime minister of Israel is the new Hitler, and Palestinians are the new Jews. Out of the scores of people I’ve spoken to, only two demonstrators told me that Israel has a right to exist.

The word Jew is rarely uttered by these protesters. Instead, people hurl terms like Zionist, settler-colonialist, and occupier. They speak of academic theories like decolonization and intersectionality—concepts many told me they learned at elite institutions like Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania.

I decided to go to the source of these ideas: The American campus, where I spoke to scores of anti-Israel activists and dozens of Jewish college students across the country.

I asked: How did an ideology once restricted to the ivory tower come to inspire masses of Americans chanting on behalf of Hamas and Yemeni Houthis? How did Gen Z, the most educated generation in U.S. history, become sympathetic to terrorism? And, most fundamentally, how did our colleges come to abandon the pursuit of truth in pursuit of something far darker?

The result is The Free Press’s first-ever documentary, American Miseducation.

The questions she asks in her last paragraph aren’t really answered, although Critical Theory seems to be a good solution: the oppressor-narrative combined with some undercover anti-Semitism. But the movie poses its own questions.  Is there really a difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism?  Should antisemitic or anti-Palestinian speech be deemed hate speech?  Who is being most targeted by campus demonstrations: the pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian students? (I’ve seen both groups claim that they are being oppressed.)  My sympathies have been made clear on this site, but I’ll withhold them for now, for you should just watch this short movie.

After seeing this movie, Malgorzata told me glumly. “The good life for American Jews is coming to an end. . . . they are now more or less in the same situation that German Jews were in after Hitler came to power in 1933.  The antisemitism started slowly, but then grew over time until it became too late escape.”  As to what kind of anti-semitism will grow in America, she said, that cannot be predicted.

I predicted (or hoped) that with New Zealand’s new Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon of the centrist National Party, New Zealand’s educational system, which was circling the drain, would find its way out. After all, Luxon promised to reform the educational system by emphasizing “teaching the basics.”  (New Zealand performs poorly in math and reading compared to countries of comparable well being.) Most of all, I hoped that Luxon would purge the wokeness of the Kiwi educational system, especially the teaching of indigenous superstitions and “ways of knowing” that seem to be insinuating themselves into science education.

Now I’m not so sure.

Reader Al sent me the tweet below, which was like a (mild) punch in the gut. It comes from the (now protected) account of New Zealand’s Chief Science Advisor, Dame Juliet Gerrard. She was appointed for a three-year term on July 1, 2018, a term that was apparently renewed in 2021 by the woke and now ex-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Gerrard’s present term expires on June 30 of this year. I hope Luxon replaces her, as she’s clearly woke and misguided, and a fan of those who sacralize the indigenous people, a tendency that’s warped New Zealand academics.

At any rate, have a look at this tweet:

*********

UPDATE:  The tweet appears to be from 2019, but recall that Gerrard is still the Chief Science Advisor for New Zealand. It’s not clear to me when Gerrard locked her account. The point remains that the present Science Adviser to the Prime Minister has a view of sex that is misguided, probably because of wokeness. In my view, she should not be the science advisor, but that may be solved in June.

*********

The PM of New Zealand's Chief Science Advisor @ChiefSciAdVisor has locked her account after tweeting this stupidity… pic.twitter.com/K0x66eTfnP

— Andy (@lecanardnoir) January 31, 2024

The first sentence is okay, the second is crazy, at least regarding “sex”. The third is mixed, for if you go to Wikipedia under Intersex, you see the declaration that sex is not binary, but also that indicators of sex, like genitalia, are pretty close to binary:

Intersex people are individuals born with any of several sex characteristics including chromosome patterns, gonads, or genitals that, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies”.

Sex assignment at birth usually aligns with a child’s anatomical sex and phenotype. The number of births with ambiguous genitals is in the range of 1:4,500–1:2,000 (0.02%–0.05%).[3] Other conditions involve atypical chromosomes, gonads, or hormones.

The best source I know of for the frequency of intersex is that of Leonard Sax, which is also quoted ion the Wikipedia article:

A study published by Leonard Sax reports that this figure includes conditions such as late onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia and XXY/Klinefelter syndrome which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex; Sax states, “if the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female,” stating the prevalence of intersex is about 0.018%. This means that for every 5,500 babies born, one either has sex chromosomes that do not match their appearance, or the appearance is so ambiguous that it is not clear whether the baby is male or female.

In both cases, the number of people considered “intersex” is very low.  But that’s pretty much irrelevant to the discussion of whether sex is a spectrum, for biologists, as we discussed yesterday, use a definition of sex involving gametes: if you have the reproductive apparatus to produce small mobile gametes (even if that apparatus is inactive), you’re a male who makes sperm. If you have the apparatus to produce large immobile gametes (even if you can’t, as if you’re postmenopausal or sterile), you’re a female who makes eggs.  If you don’t fit either of these classes, you’re often (but not invariably) classified as intersex.  The athlete Caster Semenya, for example, has internal undescended testes, designed for making sperm, but other female sex traits, like a vagina.  Biologically I’d call her a male, but wouldn’t quarrel if others want to call her “intersex”.

But the point is that intersex individuals are not members of a third sex, so don’t really affect the sex binary: there remain only two types of gametes. We have males, females, and those unclassifiable, with the latter having frequency of one individual in 5600.

I keep repeating myself on the sex binary, along with others like Richard Dawkins, Carole Hooven, and Colin Wright, but I’ll add that the sex binary humans says nothing about the humanity of intersex individuals or transgender individuals (who usually can be classified as biological sex). With a few exceptions involving things like sports and jails, the legal and moral rights of transgender or intersex individuals are independent how “sex” is defined by biologists, and these individuals should never be denigrated for their desire to transition or for the fact that they have a biological condition that makes them intersex.

Finally, the Science Advisor cites Siouxie Wiles, who you can read about on this site (two posts here), a science communicator and microbiologist who’s done some good things, but also vigorously opposed the Listener letter that argued against teaching indigenous ways of knowing as science.  As for @whaeapower on X, it’s another protected account, so I don’t know what it’s about. It may be a Māori site given that “whae” means “mother or aunt” in that language, and because Dame Gerrard has a Māori koru (fern front) tattoo on her back.

At any rate, I guess Dame Gerrard did protect her tweets, as this is what you find when you look for them:

My point, however, is this: the official Science Advisor to the Prime Minister should not be making erroneous statements about sex, even if those statements are made to give succor to people that are not of conventional gender. That she misunderstands sex does not bode well for science education in New Zealand if Dame Gerrard continues in her position after June 30.

As for whether what looks like a quasi-official “X” account should be protected, well, you can be the judge.

My favorite Hindu god, the beloved elephant-headed Ganesha (I have a big collection of bronze Ganesha statues acquired during my many trips to India) appears in today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “hose.” Remember that in last week’s strip Ganesh appeared as an example of religious discrimination via the Hindu caste system.

Now a Hindu god walks into a bar and. . . . .

If you have any interest in UNRWA, several people, including Hillel Neuer, the head of the NGO UN Watch, will testify before a House subcommittee starting NOW. I expect there will be lot of testimony, supported by evidence, about how this UN agency was in effect an arm of Hamas.

It’s a bit late, as it was supposed to start at 2 p.m. Eastern time, but should start shortly.

Here are the witnesses. It should be enlightening:

Richard Goldberg
Senior Advisor
Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Marcus Sheff
Chief Executive Officer
IMPACT-se

Hillel Neuer
Executive Director
UN Watch

Mara Rudman
Schlesinger Professor
University of Virginia Miller Center

And here’s the link. It sounds as if there are hecklers in the audience.

Despite the acceptance by biologists of the fact that all animals have only two sexes, and that include humans, people keep insisting that there is a “spectrum of sex”, especially in humans. The “spectrum” assertion is made for purely ideological reasons: to buttress the feelings of those who don’t feel that they are either male or female, including trans people. (The weird thing about the trans issue, however, is that transitions are made between characteristics of one sex, males, and another, females, and vice versa—an implicit admission of a sex binary.

There are other arguments for a human sex “spectrum” based on things like chromosomes and genital configuration, but in the end biological sex is defined by gamete type, as I’ve noted repeatedly. Recognizing biological sex, however, is often done by looking at traits like genitals or chromosome that are usually (but not invariably) correlated with gamete type.

The Definitions: Males have small mobile gametes (sperm) and females large immobile ones (eggs). This definition was not confected to produce some kind of nonexistent binary; rather, it is what biologists observe in nature, and the gamete-based definition not only places nearly everyone (exceptions are roughly, 0.018%, and don’t represent “other sexes,” but rather developmental anomalies), byut also is immensely useful in understanding a lot about biology, like sexual selection.  Luana Maroja and I, in our paper “The ideological subversion of biology“, discuss the sex binary as one of the prime targets of biology ideologues.

But other people, including Colin Wright, Carole Hooven, and Emma Hilton, have spent much more time than Luana and I defending the sex binary and the biological definition of sex—not on political grounds but, well, because the sex binary is not only real, but immensely useful. If we let ideology corrupt biology, it distorts the whole purpose and interpretation of studying nature.

But I’ve said this many times before. Today, being under the weather, I call your attention to two articles and a video confirming and defending the sex binary. The first is by Eve Kurilova at the website The Distance, and I love the title (below).  If you’ve read here, you’ve probably heard about clownfish (viz., Nemo) being used as an example of the “sex spectrum”.  But they’re not. What happens, as we all know by now, is that there are males and females in clownfish, and males can change into females under certain circumstances. Here’s Wikipedia’s explanation:

In a group of anemonefish [clownfish], a strict dominance hierarchy exists. The largest and most aggressive female is found at the top. Only two anemonefish, a male and a female, in a group reproduce – through external fertilization. Anemonefish are protandrous sequential hermaphrodites, meaning they develop into males first, and when they mature, they become females. If the female anemonefish is removed from the group, such as by death, one of the largest and most dominant males becomes a female. The remaining males move up a rank in the hierarchy. Clownfish live in a hierarchy, like hyenas, except smaller and based on size not sex, and order of joining/birth.

Note that the words “male” and “female” are the only ones used. When a dominant female dies, one male, in a process called “sequential hermaphroditism”, turns into the alpha female, changing phenotype and ability to produce gametes. An individual that was a male, producing sperm, now changes its reproductive system to produce eggs, becoming a female. There are still two sexes, but one type can become another.  But even that doesn’t somehow buttress humans of different gender, as it doesn’t show the existence of a sex spectrum. And, as Kurilova says anyway, “humans are not fish”, so even if the clownfish did demonstrate a sex spectrum, producing novel types of gametes (they don’t), it wouldn’t say anything about Homo sapiens.  Click to read:

Kurilova (and Colin Wright) seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time correcting a misguided individual named Ian Copeland, who tweeted (or Xd) this:

Here we go again.  (There’s some question about Copeland’s “Ph.D.” designation, but you can read that in the posts. At any rate, Copeland was corrected but refused to give in. Here are two responses from Zachary Elliott, who works at the Paradox Institute and has written three books on sex and gender as well as produced several videos on biological sex:

Another correction from Colin and one from Heather Heying:

And of course the wag Gad Saad weighs in, asking if Copeland was joking (he wasn’t):

These sex-spectrum addicts are like creationists: when they can’t convince others with data, they invite a “debate”. And so Ian Copeland set up  a nearly three-hour debate with his detractors.You can listen to it by clicking below, but I’m not interested. Colin jumps into the fray from the outset, while Copeland comes off like, well, somebody that’s unhinged:

Kurilova ends her short piece this way:

It’s obvious that this is not an individual to take seriously, and many are recommending not to interact with him to hinder his engagement farming. I am inclined to agree, which is why I limited my own involvement to a couple of subtweets.

But I do feel like the response was very useful to show others how to deal with unscientific claims like the one Copeland was making. As I said, this is probably not the last time we will hear of someone trying to use the sex-changing abilities of fish to spread lies about human biology and call others bigots. The clear and concise rebuttals from people like Colin Wright can serve as an example of how to respond.

So, no, just because fish can change sex, it doesn’t mean that sex isn’t binary. And just because fish can change sex, it doesn’t mean that humans can. Humans are not fish.

But the ever-energetic Colin, who seems to think that Copeland has an open mind, recounts the debate in a post on his website. (Colin must have a masochistic streak!).  Clicl below to reads Colin’s account his own site, Reality’s Last Stand. Click below to read:

I won’t go into the details, but do want to emphasize that Colin refutes Copeland’s claim, which is common, that sex is defined by genes or chromosome constitution. It isn’t, though of course in some groups sex is correlated with genes or chromosome constitution. (Howeveer, in some reptiles sex is determined by temperature but is still defined by gametes.) I’ll quote Colin briefly. As usual, his arguments are clear:

Put plainly, “genetic sex” is not a distinct type of sex at all; it is a convenient term or shorthand to denote that a person or cell contains the sex chromosomes that typically cause a [male/female] to develop. For a geneticist, knowing this about a cell culture might be useful if they are investigating sex differences or wish to control for cellular sex differences as a potential confound in an experiment. Additionally, medical professionals often describe sex in multifaceted terms because examining a person’s chromosomes, hormones, genitals, gonads, and their alignment aids in diagnosing potential issues along this biological chain. The use of terms like “genetic sex,” “hormonal sex,” and “genital sex,” is driven by practicality, not because they represent legitimate, separate types of sex.

“Genetic sex” is not an alternative type of sex. Sex only refers to the type of gamete an organism has the function to produce.

This becomes obvious when we look at other animals, such as turtles, that do not use chromosomes to guide their sex development. In the green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas), the sex of their offspring is not determined by a genetic coin flip, but by the thermostat setting. Eggs incubated below 27.7°C develop into males, and eggs incubated above 31°C develop into females.

Discussing humans as “genetically male or female” is as illogical as referring to a turtle’s “incubation temperature sex.” In experiments, it might be convenient to label incubators set below 28°C as “male” and those above 31°C as “female,” but there’s nothing inherently “male” or “female” about these temperatures. We may use terms like “male temperatures” for those under 28°C and “female temperatures” for those over 31°C as shorthand for “temperatures that typically lead to male or female development.” However, a turtle’s sex is ultimately defined by the gamete it produces, not the temperature of its early days in the egg. For instance, if a female turtle popped out of an incubator set below 28°C, we wouldn’t say she has a female “gametic sex” and a male “temperature sex.” She would simply be female, and the researchers would likely be intrigued to learn how she developed at a temperature typically associated with male development.

In a similar vein, the Blue Groper (Achoerodus viridis) is a fish species characterized by males that are blue and females that are brown. In the field, it may be useful for researchers to use color as a quick and accurate proxy when recording a fish’s sex. However, it would be incorrect to claim that Blue Gropers have a “color sex,” as there is nothing inherently “male” about being blue or “female” about being brown.

And he quotes philosopher Paul Griffiths (my bolding)

Like chromosomal definitions of sex, phenotypic definitions are not really ‘definitions’—they are operational criteria for sex determination underpinned by the gametic definition of sex and valid only for one species or group of species.

Copeland won’t give in, and even produced this tweet below. Look at that huge area of overlap, though individuals of indeterminate sex are only 1 in 5600! Plus intersexes are not “third, four, and fifth sexes,” and so on.

Finally, Colin just put up a 35-minute lecture on the nature of the sex binary, refuting arguments like that of Copeland and P. Z. My*rs, who’s gotten on the woke “sex-spectrum” bandwagon but should know better. You can go to Wright’s lecture by clicking Dawkins’s approving tweet below, or see it to Colin’s website here.

The attempt of ideologically motivated individuals to change the biological definition of sex, trying to turn it into a spectrum, is one of the most notable examples of how biology gets corrupted by wokeness. I’m grateful to those like Colin and others who spend much of their time correcting claims of ideologues and educating the public. As for correcting off-the-rails individuals like Copeland, well, that’s like like trying to change the mind of a creationist. It won’t work unless the person has an open mind, and creationists (and “sex spectrum” loons) don’t have open minds: they are all balled up in religion or ideology.

Superbly clear & totally correct lecture by Colin Wright @SwipeWright. There are only 2 sexes & they're defined by gamete size. Convoluted attempts to deny binary sex are like Ptolemaic epicycles.https://t.co/LS3PG54JBi

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) January 30, 2024

I am feeling poorly today, so posting may be light. I do my best.

I know that the name “Netanyahu” is synonymous for “Satan” in most people’s minds, and he’s often completely dismissed or ignored. Douglas Murray, too, is often dismissed as being too conservative  or xenophobic. But you’d be missing out if you didn’t at least watch this new 32-minute video of Murray interviewing the Israeli Prime Minister. It’s entirely about the war, and Murray doesn’t refrain from asking hard questions, like what responsibility Netanyahu bears for the October 7 attacks, what he thinks of all the Israelis who dislike him, and so on.

But I found most of it enlightening, especially on the topics of Gaza, Qatar and Iran.  The Prime Minister pulls no punches about Gaza, insisting that there is no solution beyond “total victory” over Hamas, and that victory will have a huge effect on deterring other countries in the region, including Iran.  After watching this, I’m convinced that Netanyahu will not accept any kind of ceasefire.

As for “what about afterwards?”, Netanyahu says that Israel will supervise Gaza when hostilities end, though I don’t know how that would work or would go down with the world.

Netanyahu says that although Qatar seems to be playing a double attitude towards the war (hosting Hamas leaders while brokering peace), Netanyahu insists that Qatar must use its “considerable influence” to get the hostages free immediately, as well as providing them with medicine.  What if it doesn’t? Well, Netanyahu will have some words with Western countries.

Finally, the Prime Minister says that Iran simply must not be permitted to develop nuclear weapons, for it’s already inciting violence without them, and it’s horrible to imagine what they could do with nukes.  He insists that the civilized world cannot allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons.  (Murray misses the chance to ask “how can the West do that?”)

Again, I strongly recommend that you take half an hour and watch this. I didn’t want to at first, but now I’m glad I did.

Reader Roz sent a bunch of nice caterpillar photos, though not many of them are identified. It’s up to you, the readers, to identify them, or at least have a marvel at the larval. (And please send in your photos!)

Roz’s introduction is indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:

The Caterpillar Lab is a New Hampshire based non-profit that breeds and collects New England caterpillars from the field. They come yearly to the Arnold Arboretum or at least they have for the years I’ve been in Boston. I saw them fall 2021. These photos are from that visit.

As for identifying them, here is what I know:

Order: Lepidoptera

Families: Saturniidae and Erebidae

While I will let readers taxonomize further, I believe the genus and species for some of the caterpillars I saw include:

• Promethea Silk Moth (Callosamia promethea)
• Brown-hooded Owlet (Cucullia convexipennis)
• Hickory Horned Devil, the larva of the Regal Moth (Citheronia regalis), which I got to let crawl on my hand and arm.

The Caterpillar Lab has a lovely Facebook page for those who may be interested.

JAC: The first two are clearly mimics of  bird droppings.

JAC: This one’s a doozy!

JAC: Two photos of pupae:

JAC: Two twig mimics: